Sure, I had other fanfiction writer friends who read my work and shared it, but she was the closest thing I had to a writing mentor.īecause I was raised during the height of the Internet Stranger Danger era, I never shared my location or identity. I’d post a new chapter on and she would review it, offering her praise and feedback. We were in multiple Avatar: The Last Airbender LiveJournal communities together, discussing our headcanons, ships, and opinions. Sure, I might have discovered these artists decades later on Spotify, but the personal recommendations meant the world to me. I still listen to the same playlist she made for me: a bouncy mix of Europop artists like Robyn, Vanilla Ninja, and Nanne Grönvall. She recommended songs and books to get my creative juices flowing. Though I consider myself a professionally published writer, I remain jealous of her ability to craft such unique stories that hold up nearly two decades after posting.ĭ would comment on my LiveJournal posts supporting my fanfiction ideas and life updates. D’s grasp on language and storytelling enhanced whatever fictional world her stories lived in. No “out of character” dialogue that broke the suspension of disbelief. Ursa remained believable as a dedicated but troubled mother caught in a precarious situation. This divergence from the established story heightened the intrigue of this minor character’s motives. Ursa then escapes into the countryside with her daughter Azula. For example, D wrote a fanfiction where Ursa, a character from Avatar: The Last Airbender, kills her royal husband, Fire Lord Ozai, to protect her son Zuko from being sacrificed as punishment. When she wrote stories set in alternate universes, the characters still acted as they would in their canon story. D’s writing, even back then, was a notch above the common asterisk-riddled script fics and poorly written crossovers on the website. While writing this essay, I reread the stories on D’s account and was still impressed with the overall quality of her stories. I don’t know D’s exact age, but judging by her skill with writing and tone, as well as her sisterly nature, she was likely in her last years of high school or a college student when we first started talking. Somewhere in the Avatar: The Last Airbender LiveJournal ether, I connected with D. I became involved in countless LiveJournal communities for shipping, fanfiction writing, and other fandom nonsense and drama. I don’t remember how I discovered LiveJournal exactly, but I created a LiveJournal account as a form of posting daily entries about my interests, blogging about my new fanfiction stories, and sharing my opinions with other like-minded people. I wanted to know what it was like to write my favorite characters in new situations, interacting with new characters and new plots. It’s not lost on me that I liked stories centered around fantastic teens fighting evil and rarely going to school. I mostly wrote Teen Titans, Naruto, Harry Potter, and Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfiction. I kept this pastime a secret for fear of being further alienated by my school friends. Naturally, my love for roleplaying extended into writing fanfiction for my favorite shows and stories. I loved writing, especially online, where I could only be judged for my storytelling talent, not my looks or personality. We would plot out ideas in private messages and boards, recruit new roleplayers and members to our roleplay “threads”, and sometimes get into squabbles if someone wasn’t playing by the guidelines. Here, I could join other players in collaborative storytelling in either an original story setting or one based in a popular TV show, movie, or cartoon universe. The most popular feature of GaiaOnline was their forum boards, especially the roleplay forums. I spent hundreds of afternoon and evening hours on GaiaOnline, a popular anime-themed social site where you could customize your avatar and interact with others in a virtual world. In my isolation, I was sucked into the void of the Internet, where I found a creative outlet and established relationships that would become an indelible part of my internal machinery.Īs a victim of severe bullying by my peers and authority figures, I retreated into virtual fantasy worlds, cartoon websites, and blogging sites. A greasy-haired Jewish teenager, I lived in a majority Christian city with few hangouts and fewer options to socialize. Aside from the high school anime club, I didn’t participate in any other extracurricular activities. My internalized misogyny was only encouraged by what I saw plastered on television screens and glossy magazines: thin, blonde, pink-wearing preppy girls who gabbed on and on about boys and shoes. I loved anime, cartoons, manga, and hated traditionally feminine things like makeup and fashion. I was a teenage girl in the early 2000s, and I truly believed I wasn’t like Other Girls™.
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